Skip to main content

Going Home

As we shift out of the last few hours of a long holiday weekend, I'm going to share a few highlights from my hometown vacation.  Where to begin?

First, the weather was perfect. While back in RVA they were facing freezing temps, I was happy to leave the house in a light fleece or t-shirt and cropped pants.  Any day you can wake to hear the roaring sound of the ocean from your bedroom window is probably a good day, don't you think?  

Second, I was fairly spoiled by my family and friends.  I ate way too much (who didn't this week?) but it was all sooooo good.  My biggest problem (admittedly a first world problem at that) is that my mom doesn't have a coffee pot so we had to forage daily for our cuppa Joe.  Thankfully, there's a 7-Eleven (Oh thank heaven!) at the end of the block near my parents' house which forced me into a daily walk routine as well.  

I think I might have been the Queen Dork
of my high school. I can admit this now. 
Aside from the Thanksgiving holiday, the main purpose of our trip was a reunion with the other International Baccalaureate students from my high school from the classes of 1992-96.  The IB program was new to our high school when I started there so we were kind of a tight knit group of nerds.  

I missed my 10 year reunion and even the official 20 year event for my entire class this year.  We have been planning this Thanksgiving weekend event for almost a year and had so much fun seeing friends (some of whom I hadn't seen in almost 2 decades) and their families.  Sure, a few waistlines had expanded and some hairlines had receded, but we are all still young at heart.  

Who wouldn't ask these ladies for ID?
They haven't changed a bit from 1993!


Finally, I enjoyed some quality time with my other half.  When we are at home, I feel like we are almost always running in opposite directions. We were keenly aware on this trip that this was probably the last vacation before our lives change significantly again.  We slept in as late as we wanted and had a loose and relaxing agenda for most of the week. Yes, I know that's a luxury those with kids seldom get to appreciate. Trust me.  We appreciated it. 

So to sum up: good weather, good eatin', lots of laughs, and lots of relaxation.  
I feel restored and recharged (and still a little unprepared) for the hectic weeks to come that will finish off this year and the holiday season!  Bring it on!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Edge of Seventeen

It's that time of year when the blog musings center on my grief journey. Every year, it seems like we are busy with end-of-the-year school activities and the start of summer, planning vacations, and then (kablam)...it's almost July 9.  Grief is funny. Grief is weird. I remember very early after Charlotte died, I watched the movie Rabbit Hole.  There's an amazingly poignant scene where Nicole Kidman's character is talking with another woman who lost a child over 10 years before (played by Dianne Wiest). She talks about grief being like a brick in your pocket. It never goes away. Sometimes you can even forget it's there. But it comes back and makes its presence known from time to time. And (she says) "it's what you have of them."    I probably did not fully realize then what a powerful and true analogy that is. As time goes on, our grief changes. Yet, it is always there on the edge of things. It sits in that pocket and sometimes makes itself known.  This

The Stages of Grief: COVID Edition

It's 2020. It's almost Christmas. We're still in the middle of a pandemic. In fact, we are experiencing what appears to be an incredible surge that is exerting tremendous pressure on our healthcare and social service system. The headlines are clear: we're not done with this madness and December 31, 2020 will not magically be the "end of it".  Earlier in the year, our family thought about whether we might be able to travel at this time. We thought that maybe the curve would be flat enough that we could take a few days away from home during the Christmas holidays. We realized that the pandemic would still be happening, but with the right protections and with prolific mask usage, we could get a much-needed change of scenery. During what is now (clearly) a delusional thought process, we booked a stay in Gatlinburg, Tennessee for the week of December 19th. Spoiler alert: we canceled the trip almost two weeks ago.  Canceling this trip was not a tragedy. In fact, I

Bittersweet Sixteen

I think about Charlotte every single day. However, this time of year, I'm flooded with all kinds of memories as we commemorate the anniversary of her birth. This year feels like a bit of a milestone. Sixteen.  If cancer had not taken her life back in 2010, I have a feeling I would be planning a massive birthday celebration this year. 16 always feels like a landmark year in someone's life.  I have been thinking a great deal about the last birthday party we had for Charlotte in 2009. We didn't know it at the time, but we were halfway through her treatment journey. We had been through three major brain surgeries and a few rounds of inpatient chemotherapy. Treatments were not going well. In fact, right after her birthday, we would make the trip to Houston, Texas where we would settle in for about 10 weeks of proton beam radiation treatments and a new customized chemotherapy protocol. This was the unspoken "last chance option" to beat that aggressive brain tumor into